Spend Time On CRO Because It’s The Cherry On The SEO Cake

You’ve created a lovely website, you’ve optimised it for search engines, you’ve paid for advertising and people are flocking to your site in droves! But, no-one is buying anything. Why? Maybe your CRO needs optimising.

For every $92 spent on SEO, landing pages, calls to action (CTA) and blogs, only a measly $1 is spent on converting these visitors to customers. Spend some time and money and increase the sales you make.

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO)

Your CRO is the actions you take to convince your customers to take action of some sort and convert them from site visitors to customers. This could be any conversion, from buying your product, registering for a free trial or going on your mailing list. Whatever your goal is, you’ve spent time and money to get these people to your site, don’t lose them because of bad CRO! It’s like creating a dress pattern, cutting out the fabric, painstakingly stitching the whole thing together and then not sewing in the zip- makes the whole effort incomplete and a waste of effort.

So why aren’t you spending more on CRO?

There are three benefits of better CRO

Better user experience for users of your website. This good UX leads to more time spent on your website, which increases motivation to buy.

Increased site traffic. The longer people spend on your site, the better the SEO is. The better your SEO is, the more traffic you get.

Increased profit. This is the end goal, after all. More customers and a higher conversion rate means more leads, more sales, and a far better ROI. If you spent $500 and sent sales leads to 500 potential customers, and 5% of them converted to sales, that’s a CPA (cost per acquisition) rate of $20. Now, you run a few tests and fine tune your strategy. That increases your on-page conversion by 2%. This tiny percent of difference means your CPA has dropped to $14.29… a 29% reduction. Sales up, and costs remain the same!

Steps to sales success: SEO still needs attention

You still have to get customers to your site, so SEO still needs a good concerted effort. Get your search engine rankings up and you’ll get more people to your site.

Sort out your sales funnel

Once you’ve got potential customers to your site, how do you manage them? How do you direct them to where they need to go? The process of directing the customer to the page you want to go to, making them trust you, providing them the information they need to make their decision- all needs to be given thought.

Use CRO tools

You need to invest in the right tools to help you achieve your CRO goals. It should be able to do A/B testing, SRO management, and landing page optimisation- all vital to setting up your sales funnel effectively. CRO is a meaningful, methodical way to research and develop strategies that result in more clicks, more engagement, and a far better conversion rate. It’s a science that involves developers, designers, data scientists and marketers to create the psychology of making people do what you want them to.

A/B testing

This form of testing is important and it can make a huge difference. In 2009, Google did A/B testing on 50 different shades of blue for links. The winning colour was slightly purple- and people were slightly more likely to click this colour link than a greenish blue. This tiny, trivial bit of testing meant that Google made $200 million more on ad income that year. Just by changing the colour of a link.

A simple A/B test can make your site much more effective, at every step, at converting browsers to buyers.

Landing page optimisation

An effective landing page should do one thing: convert customers. It needs an effective design, free from distraction. It needs to be user friendly. It must have a very clear call to action. And, it must have a responsive design and be mobile-friendly. Most users now will be browsing from their phones, so it’s vital the landing page works from there.

CRO Tools and analytics

You need to be able to analyse your customer’s behaviour once they’re on your site. While Google Analytics can offer some insight, a good CRO tool should allow heat maps and watch what actually happens on your site; what is stopping people from converting? Do you have unnecessary obstacles? Once you have this data, it needs to be made into meaningful information. You want to be able to aggregate the data into useful data sets.

Surveys and forms

Sometimes, the very best feedback is from your customers themselves. It might not be clear that an orange site is difficult for people to look at and decreasing the length of time people spend on your site. But asking them might yield valuable insights. Create surveys that gathers this data.

CRO isn’t difficult, but it’s important

Spend time and a little bit of your advertising budget on making your website convert better, and you will reap the rewards.